Common medicines reduce dementia

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
1

Do they actually reduce dementia? Or is the correlation because people who use them are smarter and more likely to take care of their own health in many ways that also correlate with lower dementia?

This is a Macroeconomic issue because the preventions are so inexpensive and dementia is a crushing cost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/well/mind/medications-dementia-risk-decrease.html

6 Common Medications That May Lower Your Dementia Risk

Some vaccines, along with heart medications and other drugs, appear to have a protective benefit.

By Dana G. Smith, The New York Times, April 17, 2026

…
Numerous studies have found that older adults who were vaccinated against the flu had a lower risk of developing dementia in the years that followed than those who had not been vaccinated. In one study, the risk was as much as 40 percent lower.

Research published earlier this month has bolstered that evidence, showing that older adults who were given a higher dose of the flu vaccine — commonly recommended for people 65 and over — had an even lower probability of developing Alzheimer’s disease compared with those who received the standard dose…

Excitement is especially high for the shingles vaccine, which has some of the strongest research behind it. Studies from around the world have found that people who received the vaccine had a lower risk of developing dementia, often by about 15 to 20 percent…

Several studies have found that both statins and drugs that treat hypertension are associated with a roughly 10 to 15 percent reduced risk of dementia.

Many researchers think these drugs protect people’s brains by helping to manage blood pressure and cholesterol, both of which are risk factors for dementia…

A recent large review paper listed anti-inflammatories as one of the classes of drugs that may reduce dementia risk…But studies looking at the connection, especially with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, have been mixed. …

More research is needed to determine if drugs for Type 2 diabetes indeed lower the risk of dementia… [end quote]

The primary use of the drugs should be incentive enough to use them. Reducing the risk of dementia is just the icing on the cake. It’s not clear from this article how many of the risk factors (e.g. education, socioeconomic status, etc.) were accounted for but they probably were.

The actual drugs being developed to prevent or treat dementia have a much lower relative risk reduction than the vaccines.

Wendy

6 Likes
2

Speaking of Alzheimer’s, I came across this article pointing out some problems with the amyloid-β connection.

At the end of last month, a scientific journal pulled a research paper on Alzheimer’s disease.

The retraction came from Neurobiology of Aging, which removed a 2011 paper claiming to show that a version of a protein called amyloid-β was responsible for memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease. On its own, that might not seem notable; bad papers can make it through peer review and are only caught after publication.

But this wasn’t an isolated case. Over the past few years, multiple studies arguing that amyloid-β is the central driver of Alzheimer’s disease have been retracted. Some scientists have even been indicted for fraud over the issue. All the while, none of the drugs targeting this protein and its pathway have had any real clinical effect.

DB2

7 Likes
3

I’m golden, then:

Higher vaccine dose = 50% less
Shingles vaccine u= 20% less
Statins = 15% less
Total: 85% less chance.

You can add these, right? :wink:

3 Likes
4

Aren’t you supposed to multiply them?

Pete

1 Like
5

One thing to note WRT retractions…and this pertains to research in any scientific field, not just to the biological sciences…is that if those retraction are instigated by a third party (the journal itself, say) rather than by the author(s) it’s almost always because of some dodgy reason. It was a near daily occurrence during Covid…to the extent that I stopped following Retractionwatch, it was so depressing. Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent case report on the MMR vaccine implying a link with autism would be a perfect example. Nothing to criticize on first blush…but plenty to be skeptical of. Only when the fraud became apparent over subsequent years did the retraction occur.

The ability for an author to retract a paper has a long standing legitimate use, and is designed for correction of honest mistakes that escaped notice until publication. Papers usually remain as part of the Scientific archive (unless the error was really bad)…but with notice of correction clearly printed.

It’s not designed for removal of papers that, with the passage of time, didn’t hold up to initial appearance of a valid hypothesis.

Details to bear in mind when reading articles about research papers, rather than the primary document itself.

3 Likes
6

Good to know. This paper was retracted by the journal editor.

DB2

2 Likes
7

Like The Lancet with the Wakefield paper. Journal editors only do this when nefarious activity has been detected. I’m trying to lay my hands quckly on a paper that had a similar impact (from the point of view of press promotion) but was corrected when the senior author checked his math.

It was a study on the Biggest Loser contestants in about2014 or so that initially showed a massive drop in resting energy expenditure post the competition that was independent of the expected drop due to estimated muscle and fat loss from the diet/exercise regimen …and gave a lot of credibility to the argument of why such massive weight loss couldn’t be maintained. Kudos to the author, he made sure the gaffe was corrected with an honest mea culpa too. Yes, still showed a metabolic adaptation but way less than the original claim. The Scientific Method at work.

3 Likes